Under a thick Lowry rain cloud in Bloomsbury, central London, a small crowd shake out umbrellas, shuffle into a museum shop and are instantly warmed at the postcard stands: Donald McGill’s lewd seaside cartoons, Rupert Bear comics and biting satire of the British from the masters of Punch. There’s no secret behind the popularity of this tucked-away gallery: the comfortingly familiar works on show are a welcome mat, as well as an invitation for a hearty laugh.

Cosiness aside, The Cartoon Museum is a particularly appropriate place to visit now because it is at the centre of a celebration of great British caricature. The Cartoon Art Trust, the charity that founded the museum – the only one of its kind in the country – is marking its 21st birthday. And at a ceremony this week the trust named the Telegraph’s Matt Pritchett as Pocket Cartoonist of the Year for the fifth time. Another tribute went to British comic Viz – which shifted over a million copies per issue at its 1990 peak making it the third most popular magazine in the country – and is the focus of a riotous exhibition now showing at the museum.

Curator Anita O’Brien says that cartoons have been part of “a mass market” for centuries. Even before mass reproduction, pictorial satire - an invention of the 18th-century artist William Hogarth, who first distilled profound social criticism into witty engravings, was a popular form of entertainment. “In the 19th century, print shops would hire cartoons to people for a couple of days, rather like we hire DVDs,” she says. “They were incredibly dense, with references that audiences would enjoy unravelling.”

The social power of cartoons peaked, arguably, during the first half of the 20th century. David Low, the best-known political cartoonist during the Second World War, received a letter from the War Office in 1939, asking his advice on how best to undermine Nazi propaganda. “Ridicule,” was his reply – and his famous representations of Hitler in his distinctive black brushwork earned him a top spot on the Fuhrer’s most-wanted-dead list.

But what space is left for cartoonists in our digitally obsessed culture? “Pictorial satire is so ingrained in our culture that people often don’t realise what a huge part of their lives it is,” says O’Brien, “not just in comics and newspapers, but also animations, games, advertising, greetings cards, even film”.

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Caricature has also helped shape relationships between public figures and the world at large. Looking at a recent work created in response to the MPs expenses, O’Brien says: “Public attitudes to government and corruption are something that is ongoing - and will still be of interest in 10 years.”

Matt Pritchett is not so sure. “A cartoon’s just a cartoon, part of the daily news,” he says, modestly. But he does find a timelessness in some of his favourite comics. “Pocket cartoons might sit, yellowing, on somebody’s fridge for a while but works like Pont’s The British Character series go on forever.”

Pont’s self-deprecating Twenties caricatures of the British seem to anticipate popular television characters like Basil Faulty. HM Bateman’s observations of social faux pas have also stood the test of time. Bateman’s drawings are also used for teaching emotions to children with autism. “The thing with Bateman,” says O’Brien, “is that it’s always so out there, the emotion is so externalised.”

It is the cartoonist’s knack for extracting the essentials of human personality that stand up these decades-old drawings, even today. Looking around the collection of political lampoonery and human vaudeville, I observe, with horror, that for all the progress of the past three centuries, our habits haven’t changed.